About this Site

It's long past time I joined the Plone blogging world.  It's also been far too long since I've been a consumer of Plone.  Originally, I toyed with the idea of using Wordpress or Blogger, but my original inspiration was the flush of Plone 3 NuPlone sites such as those of Martin Aspeli and Tom Lazar. So I decided to eat my own dog food and stick with Plone 3.

I must say, it's been such a pleasure working with Plone as a user instead of a developer.  It's a nice affirmation to rediscover almost accidentally that Plone 3 truly does rock.  It's quite impressive how much I was able to do that didn't require any of my expertise.

I make a lot of use of collections as views for folders and categories.  This allows for content hierarchy  while also listing content in multiple places.  Specifically, each there is a folder corresponding to category  which uses a collection for its view that queries on the category.  I create content in the folder that corresponds to it's primary category and then assign all categories for the content to list it in all the places it should be listed.   I found this approach surprisingly effective and easy with OOTB Plone.

I also use plone.portlet.static which is similarly easy to use.  Installing an egg, however, is definitely one of the areas where I was grateful I had expertise to employ.  I look forward to seeing what the Plone community does to improve this story.  With buildout, eggs, entry_points, easy_install, and PyPI it seems like providing a TTW, one-step, point-and-click add-on install story is just a matter of stitching together the pieces.  Now there's a project that would be a lot of fun to work on.